The Wandering Chocoholic

Chitwan National Park, Nepal

Greetings once again from Nepal. I’m writing you from a Tharu community homestay village near Royal Chitwan National Park, in the Central Region of the country. And I’m starting to wrap my head around this country, which, despite sharing a border and a lot of cultural similarities, is really, really different from India.

For one thing, the clothing: The locals — men AND women — wear mostly western style clothing here, as opposed to India where you’d be hard-pressed to find a woman wearing anything other than Indian-style dress. For another, the landscape: There’s greenery, farming, cows that eat grass instead of garbage, and even the road construction appears to be more orderly. While the villages and towns are modest and not fancy by any means, there does appear to be a lot of personal pride here that keeps things in conditions that are quite different from those seen in India. The fresh air alone is lovely, and our cold and cough symptoms are clearing up rapidly.

Some things, however, are just as frustrating as in India. The utter disorganization of restaurant staff, to name one. On Adi’s advice, we’d pre-ordered our breakfasts last night at the hotel restaurant, because of the slowness of the service. Even with the pre-order, they managed to serve our food over a half-hour late, and to muddle up the bills in a way that you can only imagine takes a special kind of talent to do. This has been a running theme all the way through India and Nepal. You have to wonder how so many restaurants seem to have trouble taking an order, bringing the food, and then charging the customer for it. It’s, like, you had one job. But anyway.

Buddha’s birthplace

After breakfast, we hit the road. Our first stop was Lumbini, a tiny village not far from Butwal that is famous for being the supposed birthplace of Buddha. As such, Buddhist pilgrims from around the world — China, Vietnam, Thailand, you name it — flock here by the thousands. We were in Varanasi two days ago to see a holy pilgrimage site for Hindus, and here we were at Buddhism’s birthplace.

We dutifully removed our shoes and bought our tickets, and entered the temple grounds. Other than the main temple structure, there are trees adorned with prayer flags, incense and candle sites, and a giant gold child Buddha statue donated by the Thais. We saw a lot of monks — yes, praying and chanting, sure, but also on their cell phones or taking selfies. Because 2016.

Roadblocked

We left Lumbini and hit the road, climbing up into the green, forested hills. A couple of hours later, we stopped off for lunch at a small local restaurant. It only had a choice of two foods — either a noodle soup, or dal (lentils) with rice. But the view from the back terrasse was stunning — a steep drop-off into the mountains below. Absolutely beautiful. I couldn’t help but thinking how vulnerable these communities would be in the event of another earthquake like the one that shook the country in April of last year. But people here don’t really worry about such things.

After lunch, we were meant to be about an hour and a half away from our destination. Unfortunately, we had only travelled a short distance to the nearest town when we encountered a long line of trucks, buses and cars that were completely stopped. What was going on? Adi and the bus driver stopped the bus and got off to walk as far as they could to try to get some information. They returned a short while later with the news that there were protests up ahead and the roads were blocked. It looked like we were going to be there a while.

See, here’s the situation with Nepal and roadblocks: As best as I can gather, there’s tension between different regional and ethnic groups in Nepal, and roadblocks are often used to put pressure on government forces or simply to express anger or frustration with any number of a possible set of events. I have no idea of the reason for today’s roadblock; it could be to protest regional boundaries being re-drawn, to pressure the government for compensation for accidents or underfunded services, or simply because it’s Sunday and people had nothing better to do. Roadblocks are apparently fairly common in Nepal, are totally unpredictable, and have been known to last for hours or days. Apparently, tourist buses are sometimes waved through, and sometimes not. There’s no rhyme or reason. And once you’re stuck, you can’t do much about it.

Well, nothing to do but settle in for the wait, then. We ate some cookies, broke out the cards, and played a couple of rousing and hilarious rounds of Uno on the bus. It’s a universal law of backpacking: There’s always a deck of Uno somewhere.

Luckily, this roadblock didn’t last that long. We’d heard that things would re-open around five, but by a quarter to four, things started to unblock, and we were able to drive past the line of trucks to the front of the line where we saw that the block was on a bridge. The random dude who seemed to be Head Honcho In Charge took a look at our bus full of western tourists and waved us through. Thanks, Honcho!

Whew. Hopefully we won’t encounter more roadblocks on this trip, though there’s really no way to know.

Tharu homestay resort

We pulled into our accommodation just as it was starting to get dark. For the next two nights, we’re staying at a Tharu community ‘homestay’ on the edge of Royal Chitwan National Park. The Tharu people are an ethnic group native to the Nepalese foothills. The Tharu, who consider themselves People of the Forest, have a lifestyle somewhat isolated from the rest of the Nepalese. We’re going to be living in their village and exploring the adjacent national park.

I was expecting nothing but the basics. But this place is awesome. It’s less of a homestay than a resort. We’re staying in charming jungle huts with individual canopy-like mosquito nets over the beds. It has hammocks, hot water, a beachfront on the river, and even WiFi.

Logging onto the WiFi meant that we learned about the terrible train accident in India that so far has claimed over 100 lives. Most of us hastened to dash off messages to our loved ones back home to reassure them that we were safe and sound and nowhere near the site of the crash. But it’s still disconcerting; we rode these trains for the past few days, and it could have just as easily been us. Just awful, and my thoughts tonight are with the families of the victims. Sometimes, you blink and realize that it’s only due to an accident of fate that you’re alive and well. It’s a strange feeling.

We ordered dinner and drinks, and then headed down to the riverfront, where a bonfire was set up by the beach. It feels a little like camping here. Just like with Orchha, this feels like a respite from real life, and one that is much needed at this point of the trip.

Tomorrow, we visit Chitwan National Park and hopefully spot some wildlife. More soon!